Excerpts From Horace's Compromise

From HORACE'S COMPROMISE--The Dilemma of the American High School,
by Theodore R. Sizer. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
Copyright 1984, by Theodore R. Sizer. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.

On Students

Above all, the hungry student is active, engaged in his or her own
learning. It is that quality that is most appealing to many teachers.
The student takes the initiative and works at teaching himself.

Lamentably, far too few modern American adolescents are hungry
students. No more important finding has emerged from the inquiries of
our study than that the American high-school student, as student, is
all too often docile, compliant, and without initiative. Some who have
initiative use it to undertake as little engagement as possible with
school. They await their education and take in such of it that
interests them. Such students like to be entertained. Their harshest
epithet for a teacher is "boring." Nonetheless, and paradoxically,
students do accept the boring classes, as a price that the school sets.
There are too few rewards for being inquisitive; there rarely is extra
credit for the ingenious proof. The constructive skeptic can be
unsettling to all too many teachers, who may find him cheeky and
disruptive. Questing can be costly.

On Incentives

What is completely clear, however, is that most students see the
diploma as their high-school goal, the passport to their next stage of
life. The way to receive it, they now know, is to serve time, to be in
attendance the requisite number of weeks in the requisite courses. One
thereby amasses "credits," which ultimately "earn" the diploma.
Attendance is the way it is done.

If a school awarded the diploma whenever a student reached the
agreed-on level of mastery at the completion of a student's study
rather than after four years of attendance and the collection of
credits, the effect on student behavior would be dramatic. That is, we
should use the incentive that the diploma provides as a means to
improve students' learning. Award it only when there is a clear
exhibition by the student that such learning has been mastered. Be less
concerned about means, such as mere attendance or how many years a
student has been at school. Place the emphasis on ends, on exhibited
mastery.

This approach would give the students a clear, academically
substantive goal, the obviously appropriate priority.

It would usefully undermine the tyranny of age-grading; a student
can elect to exhibit his mastery when he is prepared to do so, not just
when his birthday signals that he "ought" to be ready. It would give an
incentive to the students' learning on their own and would reward those
who do. It would eliminate the painfully distorting counting of
Carnegie units, where equally useful but very different
enterprises--physical education and physics, for example--are equated,
usually on an "hours-attended" basis.

It would ensure sustained attention to key subjects and topics, a
major improvement over the current system, where a student can drop a
subject, such as mathematics, when the credits are earned, perhaps even
in the 10th grade. Two years later, the diploma--presumably a symbol of
a mastered general education--is awarded to a 17-year-old who has
forgotten, because of disuse, much of mathematics.

For teachers, the need to create the mechanisms for students to
exhibit their mastery will force into the open the myriad questions of
academic priorities that now lie buried under the political neutrality
of the credit-collection system.

On CurriculumAnd the Roles of the Schools

Late-20th century high schools deserve a more appropriate purpose
than a warmed-over version of principles promulgated in 1918. We are no
longer in the early 20th century, needing an institution that provides
a comprehensive set of experiences to prepare adolescents for a newly
modernized state. We live today, crowded together, in a culture
overloaded with information, surfeited with data and opinions and
experiences that we pump up with the buttons on our TV sets, home
computers, telephones, and word processors. The world around us, for
good or ill, is a more insistent, rich, and effective provider of
information than was our grandparents'. Education's job today is less
in purveying information than in helping people to use it--that is, to
exercise their minds.

An earlier day may have required that we create an institution to
fill a full range of needs, to provide the comprehensive objectives
that are now so deeply ingrained in American tradition. Today we need
to ask what special role schools should play among the extraordinary
sets of educating influences around and available to the modern
American adolescent.

One purpose for schools--education of the intellect--is obvious. The
other--an education in character--is inescapable. ...

Obviously, American high schools must reconcile their practice and
their philosophy, and find convincing rationales for both. One cannot
proceed with this process, however, without addressing the issue of
compulsion. What learning can the state properly demand of its
citizens? How should that demand be exercised? Indeed, should there be
a common learning among Americans, a set of skills and attitudes and
beliefs that all share? If this common learning does not readily arise
from private choice--that is, skills and beliefs that emerge
consistently from the informal family and neighborhood structures of
the country--how should it be mandated?

While there may be a certain, theoretical contradiction between a
state which asserts that it exists at the pleasure of the governed, who
have important rights as autonomous individuals, and a state which
requires that all individuals understand and believe certain things and
act in certain ways, it is fanciful to argue that the state has no
claims on the minds and actions of its citizens. The real issue is what
claims and how they are to be met.

The essential claims in education are very elementary: literacy,
numeracy, and civic understanding. Literacy means more than merely
skills in decoding works. It means the ability to comprehend and to
understand ideas and arguments to a degree that allows an individual to
use them. Literacy implies clear thought; that is, one must read easily
and sensitively enough to comprehend at least the basic arguments
presented by contemporary political and social life. Without that
ability and the correlative ability to present such arguments oneself
orally and in clear writing, a citizen cannot fully participate in a
democracy. Any community that expects collective, affirmative
government requires a literate citizenry.

Numeracy means the ability both to use numbers, arithmetically and
algebraically, and to understand the concepts, relationships, and logic
embedded in mathematical thought. A modern citizen cannot make critical
judgments without these skills.

Civic understanding means a grasp of the basis for consensual
democratic government, a respect for its processes, and acceptance of
the restraints and obligations incumbent on a citizen. These restraints
and obligations are eloquently summarized in the Bill of Rights. One
need go not much further: If all American citizens had mastered at the
least the complex principles there, this would be a more just society.
...

My basic conclusion is contained in the aphorism "Less is more." I
believe that the qualities of mind that should be the goal of high
school need time to grow and that they develop best when engaging a
few, important ideas deeply. Information is plentiful, cheap; learning
how to use it is often stressful and absolutely requires a form of
personal coaching of each student by a teacher that is neither possible
in many schools today or recognized an an important process. ... In
sum, these skills--reading, writing, speaking, listening, measuring,
estimating, calculating, seeing--and the basic modes of imagining and
of reasoning should be at the core of high-school work. They should
pervade all subjects offered and be visibly and reviewably part of the
school program. ...

I would organize a high school into four areas or large
departments:

1. Inquiry and Expression

2. Mathematics and Science

3. Literature and the Arts

4. Philosophy and History

You will immediately note that "English," that pivotally important
but often misconstrued or even unconstrued "subject," would disappear.
By "expression," I mean all kinds of communication, but above all
writing, the litmus paper of thought. Some of "communication" is brute
skill, such as the use of a keyboard (that sine qua non for the modern
citizen) and clear, if rudimentary handwriting. Visual communication is
included, as are gesture and physical nuance and tone, those tools used
so powerfully by such masters as Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. A
teacher cannot ascertain a student's thought processes unless they are
expressed.

Mathematics is the language of science, the language of certainties.
Science, of course, is full of uncertainty, as is much of higher
mathematics, but for beginners it is the certainties that dominate.
Number systems work in certain ways. Axioms hold. The pituitary gland
secretes certain hormones; if it fails to do so, predictable
consequences ensue. The work around us has its share of certainties,
and we should learn about them, learn to be masters of them. Basic
arithmetic, algebra, some geometry and statistics, physics and biology,
are the keys. I would merge the traditional departments of mathematics
and science, thus forcing coordination of the real and abstract worlds
of certainty. The fresh, modern necessity for study in computer science
can be the first bit of glue in this process of collaboration; that
subject nicely straddles both areas.

Human expression cuts across written and spoken languages, theater,
song, and visual art. There is much common ground in these attempts of
man and woman to explain their predicament, yet English, music, and art
usually proceed in as much splendid isolation as do mathematics and
science. This is wasteful, as aesthetic expression and learning from
others' attempts to find meaning is of a piece. All need representaion
and benefit from an alliance.

History, if it is responsibly taught, is perhaps the most difficult
subject of most high-school students, because it involves the
abstraction of time past. One often can engage it well first through
autobiography and then through biography, preceeding finally to the
"biographies" of communities, which make up most conventional history.
Things were as they were for reasons, and from these incidents evolve
concepts in geography, economics, and sociology. For most students at
this stage, these disciplines should remain the handmaidens of history.
The exception is philosophy, particularly moral and political
philosophy. A political philosophy, essentially that associated with
American constitutionalism, is the bedrock of enlightened democratic
citizenship, and adolescence, more than any other stage of life, is
filled with a search for values. The study of elementary ethics, for
example, not only provides excellent opportunities for learning
intellectual skills, but also powerfully engages students' interest.
...

On Teachers

In one sense, high-school teachers should feel that they are greatly
respected, since they are allowed to teach in remarkable privacy. Few
teachers watch each other teach. However, this privacy may be less the
result of social respect than of indifference. One can read some
parents' minds: Our kids'll learn that history stuff on their own, and
it really doesn't matter if they don't learn it all, because they'll
never actually use it much. But be nice to our kids. Give them good
grades. Many teachers hear this quiet signal, with or without cynicism.
Undoubtedly it is there. Thus, the privacy of the classroom is not
always the honored badge of the professional but an indication that
what happens there is thought to be of relatively little
consequence.

Few find much mystery in teaching. The technical expertise is not
arcane and it has a familiar vocabulary, the monstrously pretentious
language of some educationists notwithstanding. The distance between
professional and client that often exists in medicine and law and the
autonomy created by many business people does not exist for teachers.
The qualities that make for good teaching are generally available
qualities--knowledgeability, energy, clarity, empathy. Given this fact,
the teacher lacks the respect-laden autonomy enjoyed by other
professionals. The individual instructor or groups of instructors
rarely decide what the basic outlines of their curriculum will be. That
is handed down, either by adminstratively senior colleagues or by lay
boards, often with elaborate teaching guides. (Teachers can sabotage or
ignore these ... and few people will find out.)

Teachers are told the amount of time they are to spend with each
class--say, 55minutes five times a week. Even though they are expected
to be competent scholars, they are rarely trusted with the selection of
the texts and teaching materials they are to use, a particularly
galling insult. Teachers are rarely consulted, much less given
significant authority, over the rules and regulations governing the
life of their school; these usually come from "downtown." Rarely do
they have any influence over whom their immediate colleagues will be;
again, "downtown" decides. One wonders how good a law firm would be if
it were given manuals on how to apply the law, were told precisely how
much time to spend on each case, were directed how to govern its
internal affairs, and had no say whatever in who the partners were.
Teaching often lacks a sense of ownership, a sense among the teachers
working together that the school is theirs, and that its future and
their reputation are indistinguishable. Hired hands own nothing, are
told what to do, and have little stake in their enterprises. Teachers
are often treated like hired hands. Not surprisingly, they often act
like hired hands.

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